Jay Wilson’s Twitter Feed Removed

Many of you may follow Jay Wilson’s Twitter feed for occasional updates on the game but today Jay’s @Angryrobotics Twitter account has vanished.

Personal Twitter accounts of Blizzard employees are private accounts and are not channels for “official” news and opinion. They are private, but sometimes Jay would post an update on certain topics to try and get some more info out to the community.

For the past few months the occasional bits of Diablo 3 news would come through from Jay. Lately Jay has been Tweeting about the status of PvP to try and keep us in the loop outside of the “official” blogs and Twitter which I have to say has been nice to see.

Unfortunately every time he tweeted a torrent of abusive responses and personal attacks were unloaded on him and I would guess this is the reasoning behind withdrawing himself from Twitter.

A few days ago Blizzard posted a response to a thread on the official forums regarding Blizzard and Jay’s interaction with the Diablo 3 community.

“That’s totally understandable. We do want to update players on PvP once all the details are finalized. We’re not at that point yet, but Jay understands that it sucks to wait and has been trying to bridge that gap via direct updates on Twitter. He’s a good dude and really cares this community, despite so many statements to the contrary. =/”

Many players have been frustrated with a lack of communication since the game launched, sometimes warranted, sometimes not. Things do seem to be looking brighter and CM Lylirra has been chipping in responding more where she can and it’s this kind of pro-active community interaction that’s needed while we continue to wait for major updates.

Only half ‘self-inflicted’. The other half is his service as a lightning rod for the bad decisions of people underneath him and shortcomings of designers and producers below him.

Also, I doubt closure of the account means he’s fired. More likely the opposite, he’s shutting it down to consolidate 100% of his identity behind the corporate walls. Which is smart, Bobby and Mike still love him as the guy who sold ten mill, and their opinions matter 10000x more than the collective one of the ‘fanbase’.

Only half ‘self-inflicted’. The other half is his service as a lightning rod for the bad decisions of people above him and shortcomings of designers and producers below him.

Also, I doubt closure of the account means he’s fired. More likely the opposite, he’s shutting it down to consolidate 100% of his identity behind the corporate walls. Which is smart, Bobby and Mike still love him as the guy who sold ten mill, and their opinions matter 10000x more than the collective one of the ‘fanbase’.

Karma for what!? trying to feed us information? Defending his staff? Trying to give us the best possible product he can (though, in the eyes of many, he clearly failed to do so)? The only people at fault here are the arrogant, ignorant, abusive and selfish “fans” who criticise a product because it has not fulfilled their expectations.

It’s good that you complete your arguments with phrases like “you freakin douchebag”. Really drives my point home.

And then you follow up by saying things like, “They have done a piss poor job on every aspect of this game”. Clearly, they haven’t. There are many aspects people don’t like about the game, but there are a ton of great things about it, too – it’s all a matter of opinion. If you don’t like it, okay, that’s *your* opinion and everybody’s fine about that. The vitriol spouted by yourself and others at both the dev team and those who do not share your opinion, however, simply highlights your own puerility and pettiness more than provide any meaningful or useful contribution.

Good. I’m glad his twitter account went through an iteration because it wasn’t very “fun.”

Let’s be honest I actually feel a bit for Jay here, but frankly speaking nothing he said via his twitter bridged anything. It was either wrong or nothing worth mentioning.

Saying pvp blog update SOON wasn’t very useful, neither was pvp blog update maybe by the end of the month. We all know PVP blog update is the next thing on the BLIZZ to do list along with 1.07. That’s not news and it’s certainly not helpful to post ambiguous or even incorrect dates. So even if Jay was correct on the date of pvp blog it’s still pretty useless information overall.

This is why I can’t stand most blue responses, they are all calculated to get the most out of nothing. Their job is to basically twist and manipulate the conversation in order to make things look good, but avoid transparency. That is why I find it laughable when there is a blue post that says something like “ohhh we looove this community so much and try so hard to help you guys what can we do better to communicate with and be useful blahhhh?” TRANSPARENCY. And they have no control over transparency since their rules of communication are dictated from the higher ups that somehow think its useful to do everything secretly. Hey Blizzard. WE WANT TRANSPARENCY.

Of course there are people going to complain about anything and everything there are parts of the d3/blizz community that are little rotten bastards, but lets be honest these little tidbits of “soon” and total lack of transparency only make things worse. I gurantee there are numerous things in PVP that are slated to be final and the fact that they have to wait for a blog post to say ANY bit of it I find totally pathetic.

the “fun” was more a tongue in cheek response I honestly don’t care about a twitter response being fun :).

The key part is information. And real useful information is totally lacking. So as the blue tries to point out that Jay attempts to bridge some gap of total silence to communication with the community he fails either way if all he can say is pvp blog soon. The problem goes higher up than Jay and the problem is transparency and actual useful information. But if Jay is bound to keep his mouth shut on useful info on pvp he might as well keep his mouth shut period.

“Of course there are people going to complain about anything and everything there are parts of the d3/blizz community that are little rotten bastards, but lets be honest these little tidbits of “soon” and total lack of transparency only make things worse. I gurantee there are numerous things in PVP that are slated to be final and the fact that they have to wait for a blog post to say ANY bit of it I find totally pathetic.”

Yip, totally 100% agree.

All of this whinging “oh, we can’t say anything until it’s final otherwise people get mad!” crap. All they have to do is post something with broad outlines of things they are very certain to be in the patch, even if they don’t give any details. Something like this:
Broad changes planned in 1.07:
– Changes to crafting, including costs of recipes and results
– Changes in boss affixes, some tweaked, new ones added
– Changes in shrines
– Rebalancing of class skills and runes, including resource changes
– New legendary items

Well if this is the case maybe he resigned because he was sick of all the politics and corporate greed in Blizz. I do not think Jay is stupid. He knows itemization sucks, PVP should be out months ago etc. He has been the face man to take all the riot from player-base and maybe he got sick of higher management holding him back in the decision making and game improvements. Maybe…

We couldn’t be so lucky. Jay is no doubt still employed with Blizzard as no doubt anyone else wouldn’t be stupid enough to employ the man. Removing his tweet would have been a personal decision to preserve his ahem career at Blizzard. Too bad people waiting for pvp though as its about the only thing in the game to look forward to nowdays.